him.
“You don’t know, do you, old man? You doubt. You suspect I’m right…”
“I don’t know,” Goedellin conceded. Softly, like a defeated, shamed child. “I don’t know. I had thought it might become clearer to me. But I see things, I feel things, so… unnatural. It is…”
“Foul,” Kanin encouraged him. “Wrong. It is against all reason for one such as Aeglyss to be the answer to the creed’s hopes.”
“Reason?” Goedellin murmured. “Reason has never been a cornerstone of the creed, Thane. Fate does not submit itself to reason.”
Kanin groaned in exasperation.
“Seek guidance, then, from your First, if you’re too fearful to make your own decisions.” he sneered. “If you’ve not the courage for it, send messengers to Kan Dredar, telling them how things have gone awry. Hope that Theor and the rest will render the judgement you’re incapable of.”
Still there was no reaction from Goedellin. No anger, no resentment, no bruised self-importance. Kanin had never seen one of the Lore so enfeebled by uncertainty.
“My messages go unanswered,” Goedellin said miserably. “I do not even know if they have reached the Sanctuary.”
Kanin did not conceal his contempt. “I’ll waste no more time on you. Look at yourself, Inkallim. Where’s all the strength, the discipline of the Lore now? You’re supposed to be the ones who guard the people against error. What use are you, when one halfbreed can steal everything away from under your very nose? The Battle, the people, the creed itself.”
The Thane pulled open the door.
“Try your visionary dreams for answers, Goedellin. If your reason isn’t enough, or your masters in Kan Dredar, try your secret roots and herbs. I’ll find you a bed, if you want one, and you can reside here as long as you wish, but spare me any more of your fumblings, your flailings.”
Goedellin grunted. “Perhaps. Seerstem’s brought no clarity yet; quite the opposite. But perhaps. I hope for understanding.”
“You hope in vain,” said Kanin scornfully. “Your dreams won’t bring you anything, because you don’t even know the right questions to ask. This stopped being about the creed, about fate, a long time ago, but still you think there’s some truth to be teased out of it. There isn’t. This is about blood now, Inkallim, and who is willing to spend and spill the most of it. This is about who is fierce enough, determined enough, to come out of the fighting pit alive.”
He left Goedellin sitting there alone, a sad and shrunken figure hunched down in a chair. A man left puzzled and bereft by a world that had twisted itself into a shape he could no longer comprehend.
Outside the ruins of Kan Avor, on the fringes of the sodden plain that had once been the Glas Water, a huge willow tree stood. It carried snow in the joints of its soaring branches. Its immense trunk burst from the ground and sprayed up into the air like the antler-crown of some titanic buried stag. When it was young, spindling its way up out of the wet earth amidst a host of its eager fellows, Avann oc Gyre ruled in Kan Avor, and the streets of that place bustled with the life of a thriving Blood. Later, there had been slaughter within sight of it, and the blood of thousands had sunk into the loam, to its youthful roots. As it rose to its full stature, so the Lannis Blood had risen around it, and a great dyke had been constructed, and the proud city so near at hand was drowned. The long seasonal pulse of the Glas Water ruled its life thereafter: in the winters, the waters came to lap around the base of its slowly swelling trunk; in summers, they retreated. And in those dry times, the people of the valley came and cut away its peers one by one. It had been alone for many years, standing in solitude amidst pool and marsh, spared the axe by chance which the years turned to habit.
Upon this solitary giant a multitude converged. They came from Grive, and from Anduran, and from Targlas beyond it, trampling new pathways into the expanse of blank snow that lay across the valley. It was not only the people of the Black Road who assembled there on the frigid flatlands. The subjugated folk of the Lannis Blood gathered too, some by choice, some driven like cattle by their new rulers. The promise of momentous events was abroad and compelling. They came from vast Anlane itself: White Owls emerging in bands of ten and twenty from beneath its vast bare canopy.
Most of all, they came from Kan Avor, the dead city reborn yet still dead. They swarmed out from that rubble in their hundreds, disgorged from its every crevice. And in the midst of them came the na’kyrim himself, riding a wagon pulled by gigantic Lannis horses that had once hauled timber from the forests. He sat in it alone, braced against straw bales wrapped in cloth, armoured against the cold by a heavy cloak that he enfolded about himself so deeply his shape was lost beneath its weight. Ice crackled under the wheels as they crunched through the frozen puddles along the track.
Forty Battle Inkallim rode in escort. Hothyn and his Kyrinin walked after the cart in a great dispersed crowd. On either side, as far as any eye might see, the na’kyrim’s people were strewn across the white plain, all of them moving through the winter towards that single huge willow tree: a convocation of the mad and the wild and the desperate and the fierce.
The wagoner snapped his switch at the rumps of the horses with one hand, hauled sideways at the reins with the other. The wagon creaked round in a tight circle and groaned to a halt beneath the spreading tree. The westering sun glowed coldly behind cloud. The multitude gathered. A thousand plumes of exhaled breath misted over their heads.
Shraeve the Inkallim drew her horse to a halt beside the wagon and leaned towards its lone passenger.
“This still seems ill advised,” she said quietly.
Aeglyss looked out with filmy eyes from within his ragged, enveloping cloak. Twin runnels of mucus had dried-or frozen, for he had a bloodless, heatless glaze to his skin-under his nose and across his lips. What little more of his face was visible was cracked and flaked. He shivered.
“Are you dying?” Shraeve asked.
“Dying?” rasped the na’kyrim. “Perhaps. Becoming, more likely. Becoming something new.”
His voice was thin. Gone was its rich, seductive lustre and its smooth caress. Now it was the crumbling away to dust of dead bark, the rustling of crisp, fallen leaves beneath a foot.
“You fear my death?” he asked her. “Or is it your own loss of influence you fear? The loss of the fire at which you warm your hands? Without me, how long would you last?”
“I do not see the necessity. That is all. You have more than enough — ”
“What would you know of necessity?” snarled Aeglyss, his sharp anger fouling his throat and almost choking him. “You know nothing about me. About what I was before, what I am now. I hear a thousand voices, countless voices, in my head. I hear the dead and the living. I suck in hatred and fear and sickness with every breath. My body burns and breaks around me, consumed by this… this flood pouring through me. And I can’t mend it. I can’t still the voices.”
Shraeve scowled at the wagoner, who had twisted on his seat and was looking back at Aeglyss with an expression of fearful awe. Seeing her displeasure, he turned away once more, and made himself small.
“I have to give them more. They’ll cease to love me if I don’t give them more,” Aeglyss hissed. “I know. I know. They’ll turn on me if I don’t give them more. Show them more. They always do, eventually. Always.”
His eyes were closed now. His head tipped back. The hood of his cloak fell away, revealing his almost naked head. The skin was so frail and thin, the bones of his skull seemed to show through it, giving it the sheen of ivory.
“The Shadowhand strains against the bonds I’ve set on him. His is a fierce will. I must be stronger, if I’m not to lose him. And the Anain. I hear them still, thinking their great, hateful thoughts. Distant… distant, but I hear them. They’ll come again for me one day, when their hate is greater than their fear. I need to be the flood itself, not just the channel the flood flows through. You wouldn’t understand. How could you?”
Shraeve’s horse had dropped its head to nuzzle the snow in search of grass. She tugged irritably at the reins.
“It will all have been for nothing, if you die now,” she said.
Aeglyss’ head sank down until his chin rested on his chest. He coughed and wheezed.
“Nothing? Maybe. But let your precious fate decide.” He spat the words contemptuously. “If it’s a new world you want out of this, this is how it happens. This is the only way it can happen, because without it I will come
